1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to communication systems and in particular, to conferencing systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Rapid establishment of voice communication sessions is an important requirement in modern telephony systems. Today, with the advent of buddy lists and contact lists, a user can set up a call by simply pressing a single button and almost immediately receive the ring-back signal from the called party. However, such “speed dialing” still requires some manual initiation of the call, which can be tedious and error prone. In addition, a user must have some knowledge of the identity of the called party to initiate the call. If the user is only aware of the location of the called party, the user may have to first access a directory service before initiating the call or the user may simply not be able to establish a call at all with the desired called party.
Moreover, traditional “speed dialing” is only able to set up a voice conversation between two parties, the single caller and the single callee. In some cases, a voice conversation between several or perhaps even numerous parties may be desired. For example, in enterprise business scenarios, people typically work on teams, and therefore, there may be a business need for the rapid establishment of multiparty voice calls to meet each team's business objectives. First-responder, emergency and government applications may also require multiparty conference calls between members of a team. In addition, multiparty calls may also be desired in consumer applications.
Many service providers offer a voice conference call service in which a group of people can simultaneously communicate with each other. Typically, in such conferencing systems, each user is provided a 10 or more digit dial-in number plus a 7 or more digit access code to join the conference. After dialing the dial-in number, interacting with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, and entering the additional access code digits, each of the multiple callers are bridged together so that they are able to speak to and hear each other within a conference room.
However, the process of joining each user separately to a conference call takes time. Furthermore, conventional conference bridge systems typically require coordination and scheduling between users. For example, the team must dial-in to the conference bridge at a certain, specified agreed-upon time. Thus, in addition to being inconvenient for all users due to entry of a large number of DTMF digits, conventional conference bridges do not facilitate spontaneous, ad-hoc voice conferences, which may be required in many enterprise, consumer and emergency communication scenarios.
For example, in some applications, especially those involving emergency response, telephone users at multiple geospatial locations must be notified of an event and then be placed in a conference call together to conduct a discussion, define an appropriate plan, etc. Existing solutions require an operator to first manually lookup various telephone numbers and then to manually place the parties together in the conference by providing a dial-in number or separately dialing each party. This can be a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Recently, some service providers have begun to offer a special multiparty voice service referred to as group push-to-talk. A user having a special type of cell phone, who also purchases a special group push-to-talk service from the service provider, can engage in a group push-to-talk voice communication by depressing a single key to speak to another user. However, group push-to-talk systems do not truly set up persistent conference calls. In the currently available push-to-talk service, only a single person can speak at any one time, and coordination or protocol is required in order to establish who is allowed to speak next, i.e. which single user is allowed to depress his/her group Push-to-Talk button on the special set.
Furthermore, the other user must also have the same special type of cell phone and same special service from the same service provider. Thus, a major limitation of this walkie-talkie-like system is that all users must have the same special cell phone devices and the same service provision. Other users having standard non-special cell phones, PBX phones and POTS phones cannot participate in the call. Currently, there are no known systems or solutions that address the need for automatically conferencing together parties with various types of communication devices based on their locations.